Due to increasing demand of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEV), the lithium-ion battery market is expected to grow rapidly in the next decade. Valuable metals are used in the cathode active materials of these batteries. The price of cathode active materials has been increasing due to the depletion of resources like cobalt, nickel and lithium.
The increased demand of EVs and HEVs will lead to a significant increase in end-of-life (EOL) batteries. Therefore, there is interest in recycling the material in these EOL batteries. Traditional recycling techniques (such as pyro-metallurgy and hydro-metallurgy) use smelting or leaching processes which eventually result in recovering valuable metals and materials and the recovered metals can be potentially used for resynthesizing new cathode active materials or for other purposes. However, these traditional recycling techniques are neither environmentally friendly nor cost-effective.